In this episode of the Tech for Good Southwest podcast, we explore the journey of Luke Ashman, co-founder of Not Impossible. Luke discusses the platform's mission to revolutionise work experience for young people through micro-placements, addressing social mobility challenges and creating meaningful opportunities. The conversation highlights the importance of technology in driving positive change and the impact of community-focused initiatives. Discover how Not Impossible is making a difference in the Southwest and its plans for future expansion.

Takeaways

• Not Impossible is transforming work experience by offering high-impact micro-placements for young people, bridging the gap between education and employment.

• Luke Ashman shares the challenges and rewards of building a purpose-driven business focused on social mobility and community impact.

• The platform's innovative approach allows young people to explore various career paths, enhancing their confidence and awareness of opportunities.

• Not Impossible's success in the Southwest serves as a model for expanding similar initiatives across the UK.

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03.18)

At Tech4Good South West, we're passionate about building momentum for the Tech4Good movement across the South West of the UK. Our mission is to amplify the positive impact of technology in tackling societal challenges and creating stronger, fairer and more connected communities. By fostering a regional Tech4Good community, we aim to support initiatives that ensure technology serves the greater good and enable everyone to thrive in the long term.

Throughout this podcast, we'll be joined by a diverse range of voices from across the tech sector, charities, investors, startups and community-driven projects as they share their stories, challenges and hopes in harnessing Tech for Good. Join us as we explore a world of Tech for Good right here in the Southwest, brought to you by Annie, Alicia and Ariel.

Hi everyone, it's Annie here for the Tech for Good Southwest podcast, where we explore how technology can be harnessed to create positive social change across our communities, inspiring people, preserving the planet and creating places. We have a brilliant episode ahead with Luke Ashman, one of the founders of Not Impossible, which is an online marketplace that connects young people with employees doing work that they care about through high impact micro placements.

Founders Luke and Emma recently completed their Bethnal Green Ventures program as well and are building a business with deep purpose. So Luke, welcome to the Tech for Good Southwest podcast.

Hi, I mean, good to be here. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:30.636)

Yeah, thank you so much. I'm just really excited about this conversation because I absolutely love what you're doing. Being a parent of those two boys that just left school as well, it also feels that I'm right in this kind of challenge that you're addressing as well. So can you tell us a little bit about your path into founding Not Impossible? What sparked the idea and what are you practically doing?

Yes. So not impossible is an idea that's been bubbling around since I did work experience at school. My background touched on two quite distinct worlds. On the one hand, I grew up in Surrey. I spent 10 years in &A. I was finance director at Pucker Herbs, which is arguably the most middle-class business going, doing organic herbal teas. B Corp, amazing business.

And on the other, my grandmother was a teenager when she had my dad, neither mum or dad got A levels, let alone went to university. And my first job was teaching. I taught in Southeast London in Thamesmeade, which is the biggest council estate in Europe. And I've spent my career in rooms, looking around the room thinking there's really no difference between.

My uneducated family or the kids I used to teach and the people in those rooms, other than an awareness that those opportunities exist, a confidence to apply for those opportunities and really understanding the tricks of the trade to get those jobs. And so our education system doesn't teach you those things. It should do, but it just doesn't give you those experiences. The system in the UK to get that, to get awareness of jobs, to get confidence to apply for them, to understand what you need to do to get them, is work experience. And it just fundamentally doesn't work.

I've always hosted it at every point post leaving teaching and going into work. And from an employer's perspective, it's just far too difficult. So not enough people say yes, which means not enough young people get those opportunities. And the stats at the moment are really depressing. One in three across the UK remember doing any sort of work experience and every single school ask families to source it.

Speaker 2 (03:35.938)

So if your family's got great connections, then you're very lucky and you get those experiences. But if you don't, you don't get anything. And really, from a first experience of the workplace, you're just stuck with who your family knows, which isn't great from a social mobility perspective, from a UK productivity perspective, in terms of getting the right people in the right jobs. And so Not Impossible was set up to fix that, to try and to redesign the whole process to be something that works for busy employers.

make it so easy for them to host, but also go one step further and try and solve the biggest problem that every employer faces, which is access to the right talent. So we just match employers with amazing 16 to 25 year olds for one hour to one day placements. The young people get to do multiple different placements across different employers, get to test them out basically, and then the employers, we hope, hire the favorites that come through their door.

So this is not a small challenge that you're addressing. yeah, and it's a very serious challenge, isn't it? And a very, very big issue. But in terms of you setting up Not Impossible and how to even start tackling something that's essentially a sort of big systems change challenge, how do you even start? kind of what were the first steps that you took to try and build something from the ground up to address this?

Yeah, we, took post Parker got sold to a big private equity house, which wasn't for me. It's not what I signed up for. And so we left, basically I left on day one of that and had some time off and spent six months talking to businesses as many as I could to say, what would it take for you to take 10 times as many young people for work experience? It was a real research phase trying to understand if what are the barriers? Cause it's a supply side problem, not demand side problem. All young people want work experience.

but there's not enough employees willing to do it. So they told us, start much smaller. So often we'll take somebody for five days and we both know on day one that it's not a good fit and they don't really want to be here. And we'll both forgot to think of things to do for the rest of the week. So they start much smaller. They said, you guys sort out the admin. We haven't got time for the communication with the schools and the parents and the young people. We just want to inspire them to follow in our footsteps.

Speaker 2 (05:56.78)

And they said, come up with a way that doesn't fall on HR teams. So it's like decentralized that anybody across the business can host. we found out roughly what employees wanted. And then we did a pilot where we signed up, signed up about 20, kept it really local, and barred employers, visited and barred young people and just tested it out and really try after each time got feedback from the young people and from the employers. And then iteratively built in everything they were telling us worked and what didn't work.

communication channels, young people don't read email, so we moved on to WhatsApp. Finding the best ways to sign up to young people again through the career services have been a challenge. So we get directly through social, it's just incrementally over time, learning what works and then post pilot. We, you mentioned we raised money from Bethnal Green Ventures to really get it working properly. And now we're at about 45 employers. We've got about 1600 new opportunities across those employers.

and about thousand young people. So we're still learning, we're still really local, but it was a research phase, then a pilot, and then raising enough money to do it at a slightly bigger scale.

Can you explain how long from doing that research phase, how long was the actual pilot phase?

Yeah, two bits to the pilot. There's the signing up companies bit, which took a good bit longer than I thought it would do. So to get those first, how about, remember what it was now, 20, 25 companies took probably six months plus to get them all on board. And that was us was really important so that when those first young people signed up, there were some employers doing something they were interested in. Cause that was a big part of our work experience is if you get it, it's often not what you're interested in. That took a good six, seven months. And then we did the

Speaker 2 (07:44.398)

pilot took another six or so months in terms of getting those young people signed up and then getting them placed with those employers. So it's probably in a total about six months research, about six months of piloting and then really we've been live for just under, well, probably about a year since then.

And how did you actually get that sort of group of young people together in the first place to be part of that initial pilot?

through educational partners. So we do it through schools, sixth form colleges and through the universities. And we're big believers that they know their young people better than anyone else ever can do. So we asked them to nominate the young people that would benefit the most, which is really typically as free school meals, sixth form bursary students, those who've gone through the care system or those who just haven't had work experience in the past as who they nominate. And then we track all that data just to make sure that the places are going to those that need it the most.

Okay, so can see why obviously you needed to have those employers ready there and those opportunities otherwise, yeah, you've kind of lost interest from them from the get go, haven't you?

And also the employees wouldn't sign up unless there's some employers on the platform for them to see, they're not going to finish the process. And we still actually keep it that way around. So we're always more employers than young people. And so some of our employees do wait a little bit to get placed because what we don't want to do is have loads of young people that are applying and then just not hearing from us.

Speaker 1 (09:08.182)

Interesting. Yeah. So from a sort of, I guess, you're still in those early stages. You're a startup, but you're an impact focused startup, as we've already talked about, is a big challenge that you're addressing. You're facing a lot of pressures in terms of practically building a technology product and a viable service, I guess, but also have a sustainable business that's having an impact. There's a lot of different things to juggle. Talk to us a little bit about that and

of how it feels and how you're trying to kind of balance all of these different demands on you at this stage.

Yeah, it's definitely a challenge and marketplaces in general, because they're trying to serve both sides of the marketplace and solve two sides of problems is definitely tricky. I love it. Like you said at beginning, it's such a big problem to solve, that every step we make towards solving that problem is just hugely rewarding. And the best bit of everything that we built is every one person sends a thank you message to the employers after being hosted.

So however many times a day, there's just a thank you message. And because for safeguarding, we don't share their contact details. So it just pops into our inbox and then we forward it on to the employers afterwards. So you get like, it is really difficult trying to make sure to keep everybody happy, but it's like, there's not many jobs you get where people that you're just like, you can see the impact of what you do every single day. it's a challenge commercially as well. So we are basically a recruitment business. We want not just to get our young people work experience placements. We want to find them jobs and we get paid when we find those jobs.

And the challenge, particularly at this phase, is because we're trying to learn as much as possible. We want to do the full 16 to 25 year old range. And we're doing that. about 50 % school age, 50 % university age. 16 year olds, we hope go to university, they're not going to job for seven years. So like actually making sure that the commercials work in terms of the balance of young people, in terms of those actively looking for work and those just exploring what the options might be best for them is definitely a challenge.

Speaker 2 (11:03.864)

That's why we need to scale so that can get enough young people across all those different phases to make it work commercially, but also make it work for young people.

Yeah, and I guess throughout all of this, it's about those impact goals that you set at the beginning, but making it sort of tangible, I guess, or the fact that you're focused still on Bath and Bristol primarily is, of course, trying to make that work within this kind of region or this ecosystem before you kind of roll it out more broadly. guess I'm interested in a bit about how you're measuring impact and whether that's something that you do on an ongoing basis. There's obviously numbers in terms of matching.

placements that are matched, but there's also a lot of qualitative stuff here, isn't there, in terms of the experience that young people have had and employers?

Yeah, so we did loads because the way the young people scan a QR code, they go through the chatbot, they tell us how ready for the workplace they are at the moment. And then we can measure that post each placement to see how that's improving. it's basically the four key things we look at. The biggest one is how optimistic they feel about the future. And 97 % of our young people feel more optimistic about the future after doing one of our microplacements. So for us, that's the biggest one is generally you want that like

positive cycle to be starting that their first experiences of the workplace are things that make them want to do more of this, especially now that there's a million young people are not in education or putting more on training. And if you spend six months out of that, and in that it's almost the other side of that cycle, then it's really hard to break out of it. So like, that's the biggest one. But then we also look at how well they have the skills that they need to impress in the workplace. And basically just how aware are they of the options that are out there for them. And even though our placement starts at a one hour virtual conversation,

Speaker 2 (12:44.546)

these metrics all would improve after each one of those conversations. And for us, a big bit of that is the matching process. So the young people choose the employers they would like to spend time with, but they don't choose the job titles. Because if you show young people a list of job titles, like no one knows what they are. I don't know what half of people's job titles are when you see it on their business card. So we match them with an employee within those employers that we think they'll like. They get a choice still though, we'll give them five different options and they pick.

of them, we try to get each of our young people three different placements now. So they get a choice and be like, actually, I might be similar to that guy in finance, but I don't want to spend any time in finance, and that's absolutely fine. We do suggest you spend time with these people because they are relatively similar to you in terms of the traits that correlate with job success. And for our young people to know that they are similar to somebody that is already working in those organizations is a really big confidence boost.

Yeah, and how is it in that whole process, how much of it is kind of automated with all of the kind of the clever sort of behavioural piece underneath and the kind of matching process versus actually conversations with humans?

So the initial list of recommended, so they pick the employers they're interested in based on a series of different questions. They then, the automation will recommend the employees that are most similar to them and that is automated, but we still have a human review before that goes out to each young person. So we just make sure that they are suitable for them. There's a good range of different options. And actually quite often we're like, actually this employee they'd really like as well. So we add a few extra in there.

They then get to choose as part of that. And then they do multiple ones. So they can themselves can then test it out and then they give us feedback after each one. So we can see actually how good a match that was and then that informs their next match. So there is increasingly automation in that process, but with enough human feedback that we can then change it and give them exposure to a different sector or different sort of person depending on how it went. And then we share that with the employees as well. So the employers can then also learn from it in terms of actually

Speaker 2 (14:45.294)

And we give best practice activities because our employees don't really have time to do planning activities. But actually how they did live those activities, was it something else really effective or actually is there things they can tweak when they host the next bus?

There's a lot of data that you're going to be wrangling with then.

Yeah, I like data. That's all good.

I wanted to talk a little bit about Bethnal Green Ventures, which is an early stage tech for good venture capital firm. And in fact, think pretty much as far as I know, one of the first, obviously been around quite a long time and they offer obviously some initial investment, but also an initial program of support, which you've been on. Just love to find out a bit more about how important, well, I guess the role of that experience at this stage of your development of Not Impossible and how has it kind of shaped

your growth and where you are now.

Speaker 2 (15:34.252)

Yeah, it's been hugely important and I couldn't recommend them highly enough, especially Bath & Bristol. They're looking to do more investments in the region and anybody that is doing tech for good, ventures should be checking them out. Mostly because like there wasn't really anything about the VC world at the beginning that made me want to do it. so when like being forced to do go on a trajectory that isn't necessarily right for an impact business.

I was worried about and to finding a partner that is really aligned in terms of they want you to use technology to make as big of an impact as possible, not to necessarily make as much profit as both doors really important for us. The amount and the equity was smallish to start with. So again, it's a program, it's an accelerator, you're part of a cohort of other businesses that are all really purpose led and you learn so much from each other. They've invested in they do two rounds a year, I think of

10 or so companies around. So the cohort of other companies you can tap into and learn from their experiences, again, has been a real big benefit. They get all the founders to come in to give you talks. So at that stage for us, sort of just post-pilot, needing some money to like drive it forward, weren't commercializing yet, wanted to keep that wide age range. It basically allowed us to carry on learning with the younger ones, make sure the platform works for all age ranges rather than trying to commercialize it too quickly.

And so it's a six week program, think, isn't it? But does that run over, is that actually literally six weeks that you kind of spend fully immersed into that program, or is it over a longer period of

No, so they changed that for our program. was six weeks back to back, or maybe the week break in the middle. One day a week in London. So both Emma and I, my co-founder went up to London for one day a week, where it's basically a morning of different activities, an afternoon of someone coming to talk to you and then a social in the evening. So you're getting to build relationships with the cohort. You're getting to learn something, a different topic each week, and then you get to meet some other founders that have been there and done that and learned from them.

Speaker 1 (17:39.65)

So actually, how do you think that kind of quite immersive program actually felt? You kind of almost had to pause everything else and just actually take all of that time to reflect, but also maybe move forward in a different way.

Juggling was definitely hard. wasn't really a... I've still got a big book of things on my table and I haven't gone back through half of it in terms of the actions I thought I would do. So it's like prioritizing the big things that you do straight away. So it is intense, but you know what it's like. Like you would never take a day off a week to learn something. So even if we have only actioned 50 % of the stuff that we've learned, that's still more than I normally do in a week of just back to back getting things done. So it was really good to take ourselves out of...

Southwest up to London, feel like you're getting a day of a bit of headspace and yes, we didn't necessarily implement everything. It was still, it's just really interesting to be exposed to the different worlds that they introduce you to.

Yeah, and I think being like you said, with kind of like minded businesses all doing very different things, but essentially juggling that we got to be a sustainable business. Otherwise we can't have any impact because that's that doesn't benefit anybody. And I'm interested around obviously, this has been a really valuable program for you. Have there been other sort of key mentors, communities, collaborators that you've kind of found along along the way that have been quite sort of key markers in your journey?

So actually, so increasing you guys been great in terms of we've been tapping in, we've got some interns from Geiston that are going to be hopefully it's not signed off yet, but hopefully helping us over some of that we wouldn't have found out without you. We've gone to the Unconfirmed, things like this. So Southwest, like you guys are like, again, couldn't recommend more highly. For us, there's been various pockets of businesses that have been really good in terms of once you tap into one, they refer us to other businesses that would also like to host.

Speaker 2 (19:22.974)

no formal networks that we've used. think outside of you guys, universities have been really good.

And just the local sort of local tech ecosystem. We were talking about that, weren't we, before we just started the podcast.

Yeah, so TechSpark actually, TechSpark is another organisation, they've been great. We did Silicon Gorge yesterday, they've helped publicise us in terms of writing articles and the Sparkies are coming up, we've been nominated for some awards. So yeah, you're right, they're another brilliant one.

Can you explain to those that might not know what is silicon gorge?

Silicon Gorge is the Southwest investor competition where you submit your application, you go through various rounds and then you present to a room of investors, Dragon's Den style, but not really Dragon's Den, where you just present and there's interesting investors in the room that come and have a chat with you afterwards.

Speaker 1 (20:13.486)

And that's the sort Southwest focus, isn't it, or Bristol?

Southwest, yeah. Yeah, really cool. Again, would recommend that.

So having had that experience and what you've seen obviously from Bethnal Green Ventures, the sort of wider ecosystem, what do you think could be done better or where are the gaps should I say to support other founders like yourself? And what I mean specifically is that those kind of startups and businesses and founders that are also deeply about impact and actually their ultimate goal is to...

is to have a social impact or an environmental impact. And that is hard. Like some of those traditional mechanisms of support are not an acceleration. Even that kind of term, I always say, is not really always very helpful for impact businesses that also need to go carefully. And they're kind of always switching between impact goals and commercial goals and how we kind of align those. Are there sort of gaps and opportunities you think for the Southwest?

it would be amazing for there to be a Southwest version of Ethel Green Ventures. So we wouldn't, by that point, if we hadn't raised that round, then we'd have been forced to either really commercialize it by going with the older age range, or it wouldn't have worked. So that funding stage when there's not a lot of grant money out there, there's not that many tech for good or for good impact investors.

Speaker 2 (21:37.09)

that just give you a bit of leeway in terms of having a few months to figure things out. It'd be great. mean, BGV do invest in, like I say, 20 companies a year, but like that, and there's been a few in the Southwest, but there's a lot more businesses that could do with that support than there is support available. So that would be amazing, I think having a fund like that focused on building that ecosystem in the Southwest.

Did you have a good sort of look around before, or as you were sort of, I don't know whether Beth and Green Ventures approached you or the other way around, but had you also kind of done a little bit of research yourself in terms of those more kind of impact focused investors?

We had, yes we did and we applied and got BGV relatively early. So there may be other ones out there that we weren't aware of, but then there weren't that many for the traction that we had. There weren't that many out there we felt.

So that kind of leads quite nicely onto we've nearly completed our first from TechFood Southwest, Southwest Impact Investing Report. We should be out in the next two or three weeks, just finalizing that. But yeah, really, really interesting because I think it will obviously change over time, but it's complex in terms of what's out there and also how you kind of find them, but also what's relevant and particularly focused in the Southwest.

And I think it's such an exciting, that's why I love doing Tech for Good Southwest, because it's such an exciting part of the country, I think, in terms of community and impact-focused businesses and just really exciting and impactful work. But actually, how can we get more of it and how can we make sure that efforts like yours are at scale and they're sustainable as well?

Speaker 2 (23:16.238)

And is that similar in terms of the report? Access to capital is the big barrier for organisations in the region?

Yeah. And I think definitely in the way that you're from our other conversations through the podcast and generally through Tech for Good is actually the program that's tailored to businesses that are also trying to bake their impact goals into their kind of commercial strategy and growth as well. Cause that's depending on what it is, you know, that's complicated. Yeah. And at what point do you have to sort of park a level of your impact goals that you really set out to do in the first place in order to make sure like you've done.

actually, have we got enough businesses on the platform so that young people have a good experience? So that actually, our whole idea is going to work? Yeah. It's complicated. And it brings me actually, I noticed this quote on your that you put on your website, which is, we believe businesses are uniquely positioned to tackle social problems, due to their resources, scalability and ability to collaborate effectively with other organizations. I absolutely love this quote.

because I think this is at the heart of certainly one of the areas that we're interested in, which is how do we get more collaboration amongst tech businesses and third sector or kind of charity sector skills in order to tackle those kind of social problems. guess, Cinta, I'd just love to hear kind of where that quote's come from in terms of your belief around what the opportunity is for businesses to tackle social problems.

So there's such an important place for charities, but ultimately charities are competing for the same pots of money. So like you need, if you set up as a charity, you're effectively, it's a bit of a zero sum game that you might be able to raise money better than somebody else, but you're actually just taking it from them. So like to mobilize the business community and the resources they have got is a much larger opportunity than setting up more charities.

Speaker 2 (25:12.858)

with the climate of funding for many charities changing. it allows for us at least the reason why we're called pending is because it allows us to keep that independence, create a business model that just keeps things in our own hands as long as we carry on solving problems for businesses, which for us the point we're trying to solve is access to talent. It's been my philosophy throughout my career, like I want to do good.

but I want to do good through businesses, building businesses that grow fast and carry on doing good and more good as they get bigger and bigger. And then for Pukka, like I loved being at Pukka, Pukka was generally a business that as we grew, more land, we sold more tea, more land got converted to organic farming, which meant more biodiversity, which meant more farmers weren't exposed to pesticides, it meant more fair premiums to those farmers. So the bigger we got, the more good we felt we did. And I think for businesses to have models.

that allow them to do more good the bigger they get is what we need. And I hope not impossible is one of those businesses that the bigger we get, the more good we do.

Well, that leads me to one of my questions, which was your vision for Not Impossible in the next year or two. So just thinking relatively over the next couple of years, what do you hope for?

So two years we will have it working, properly working and profitable in Bristol and Bath and as a playbook we can then repeat it city by city across the UK. So that's our plan. So really we're at the end of year one now post pilot and then there'll be two more years we're trying to raise another round to finish that process in terms of Bristol and Bath and then there's no reason why if it works in Bristol and Bath it won't work in Manchester and Birmingham and Cardiff and Brighton and we'll just go to city by city. Hopefully to stay regional to start with.

Speaker 2 (26:52.27)

one our big issues with social mobility is that there's no perception that you have to move to London and go work for a law firm. And there's so many amazing, to your point, in terms of the local ecosystem, there's so many amazing local businesses that to make young people aware of all of the opportunities near where they live, they're not having to move to London after school or university is really important for us.

the size of the businesses as well in the regions. They're not necessarily the ones with big talent teams going off to universities or going into schools. They would like to hire young people, but they just haven't got the resources to do so. So we really want to serve them in terms of you can recruit young people, you can meet amazing ones. We'll help you do that. And then it's good for the businesses and good for the young

was amazing, I love it. How many people are you now in the team? Because this is all going to be happening very quickly by the sounds of it.

There's five of us, so we're still four or five. people. Our super humans, yeah, I'm very lucky to have them all on board.

Superhumans.

Speaker 1 (27:51.726)

I just got a quick question for you actually about, you know, you're obviously this, this has come from a lot of your own lived experience and what you've seen in other people. So there's a real passion that you hold around what you're trying to address. How do you kind of ring fence the time that's needed right now with fight with only five of you in the business to scale and to kind of get it to this next level with actually your own sort of personal mental health and your own kind of time to actually.

be able to step away from the business, to be able to reflect, to kind of bring the energy that you need to sustain that over the next couple of years.

Good question. It's definitely tricky. there's not, your brain is just thinking about it the whole time, which because I love it, like it's actually at this stage and because it's such a like a, like a, there's such a quick reinforcement loop, like I was saying, with the feedback we get from everybody. I don't struggle, I struggle more like just not having enough time to get all the things that we need to done. I do need to balance energy levels with, and we were chatting before this in terms of events versus time.

So like really, like we used to say yes to absolutely everything. We just wanted to get out there. And now we're much more choiceful about which events will we go to. There is a day out of getting stuff done, sorting placements, meeting employers versus being places just to get ourselves out there. And that's the biggest lesson is actually just not putting too much in the diary. That means there's then a really big backlog that makes me feel particularly guilty. And that's when like I do end up struggling if I feel I haven't done the things I should have done because we've been out there trying to drum up new companies too much.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's something about needing quite a lot of kind of creative space, isn't there, just to not necessarily just work through a list of things. It's actually just follow your instinct and get the right things done that are the right priority at the time, because things move quickly, but also opportunities will present themselves when you least expect them to.

Speaker 2 (29:45.78)

They are. I've always had throughout my whole career blocked out my Fridays to try and have that creative space. It almost never happens. That Friday is free, but I still have it. This is good stuff to do on a Friday, but it's always something that happens. But trying to carve out that week for working on the business, not in the business idea is definitely something you should do. Easiest have been done.

Yeah. Okay. I would like to ask you, what does Tech for Good mean to you personally?

Yeah, so it is the only way we're going to solve our big problems. think at the scale that we need to, there are so many amazing small businesses that solve problems. But if we want to solve at scale, we need to use technology to do that. So for me, it's just opportunity. It's like the best way we can go about doing what we need to do as a society. yeah.

love the ecosystem you've created and trying to enable more people doing that because yeah it's so important.

But also understanding the complexities of it, which we've just been talking about as well. There's huge opportunity, but it's hard. And technology is changing all the time, which is also hard. And how do we kind of co-design with young people? How do we, yeah, there's just always a lot. But I think that you, think actually your whole concept of micro-placements is so relevant in this conversation, because it is also about testing and learning. That's exactly what you're trying to create the opportunity for young people to have.

Speaker 1 (31:17.432)

think it's the same mentality in business now and especially something that's a bit unknown and not always tangible is actually we just need to try and learn and then experiment and kind of grow what we're doing. And I think that's definitely where you're obviously really focused. I just think it's a fantastic, are and obviously Emma as well, just fantastic role models for purposeful business, which is just why I was really excited to have a conversation with you again today.

and the energy that you always bring to the events and things that you come to as well. And doing so much for the Southwest, so it's so great. Thank you so much for everything that you're doing and sharing your journey as well. And obviously for our young people, most importantly.

Yeah, thank you. It's an absolute pleasure. And we're so lucky that so many Southwest businesses have signed up to host young people. Because really, all that knowledge is in them. They know exactly what it takes to enter their sector. And we're just so lucky that they really want to do it. And all we do is just make it that little bit easier for them to do it and pass that knowledge on to all of our young people. it's a really good, we're really lucky that we were in Bristol and Bath and Southwest to be able to launch this and get it working because it's the best community, I think.

to do that in.

But it's also not this, it's a lot, you've got a lot of charity organizations offering these micro placements as well.

Speaker 2 (32:33.23)

We've got amazing charities are doing it as well. yeah, and we saw you say employees, not businesses in general. And it's great. And for young people, that's like, it's just finding the right sort of employer for them. Some people thrive in a charities, some people thrive in a big business, some people thrive in a small business. And that's what we try and do with the microplacements is like, we'll test out all three and see which one works best for you.

Yeah, it's awesome. Well, we know you're to do amazing, amazing. So we'll make sure that we keep this podcast and keep this as a record of the conversation. Before we wrap up, can you just let everybody know how best to follow your journey and find out a bit more about Not Impossible.

Yeah, we'd love anybody that's interested in what we do to connect on LinkedIn. That's the best channel and you can find out more about us on our website, which is teamnotimpossible.com.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Luke. On a Friday, which is supposed to be on the business, not in the business. And I'm exactly the same. So clearly it's this type of thing that we're going to do on a Friday. that's all good. Thank you so much, Luke, for sharing a bit about your journey and where it's well, we'd love to obviously we'll share with everybody any kind of update and news that you have following obviously your various pitches and fundraising rounds that you're doing as well. So we'll keep on track with your journey. Thank you so much.